Brotherhood of Adversaries: By Any Other Name DISCONTINUED
by scribblemyname
Summary: History always repeats itself. Raven/Hank
1. The Strangers We Know

**Title: **By Any Other Name  
><strong>Summary: <strong>History always repeats itself. Raven/Hank  
><strong>Prompt: <strong>LJ prompt meme. Raven comes in disguise to see Hank. He identifies her by her scent. Prompt by **rubynye**  
><strong>AN:** Yes, I have other stories I owe you all. I'm even working on them. I promise. And I'll get them posted soon.

* * *

><p>Hank "met" her at Harry's Hangout, the little diner place down the road where they'd already accepted Xavier's team for exactly what they were, blue fur and all.<p>

But she wasn't blue.

Mediterranean, Hank thought, when he walked in and saw her. Gold skin, high cheekbones, impossibly dark hair rippling over her shoulders, a reserved grace that did not fit at all with the radiant brightness of a certain blonde girl who had been sheltered a little too well, a little too long, before he'd trampled all over her heart one battle's eve. She smelled exactly like the a summer's day, all blue and heat and freshness.

She smelled like Raven.

She was reading a thick tome on science and paranormal phenomena, one eyebrow furrowed in evident confusion.

Hank knew the book, knew how dry and dense it was (though it had fascinated him ten years ago when he first figured out that he was no longer what someone could call "normal"), and wondered if it was Charles' dreadful papers that could enable her to plow through such a work with such studied concentration. He hesitated. This could all be a ploy (but of course, it was; she was the mistress of illusion), but to what end?

Almost against his will, he ordered his usual, then asked the mediterranean stranger (who was not a stranger), "College?" Hank put one hand on the back of the chair opposite her nervously, but couldn't bring himself to ask directly.

She smiled, brilliantly, but again, so unlike _her_ smile. But it was beautiful. The illusion was perfect and when she nodded, a trifle helplessly, and offered him the seat in front of her, he took it, all too glad to pretend she really was a stranger and that they'd never really met.

She gave him a shy, guarded smile and brushed a lock of black hair off of her golden cheek. "I'm Trish."

"Hank." He smiled back, then closed his mouth hastily. His smile was fiercer now that his whole body was like a ... beast. He grimaced at the thought, then froze. His grimace was worse than his smile.

'Trish' glanced at him quizzically. "Are you okay?"

"Fine." He nodded and reached for his cup. But Harry hadn't brought it yet. Hank drew back his hand again. "So." He nodded at her book, pretending nonchalance with nothing like her practiced ease. "Tough reading?"

Her brow furrowed. She set the book on the table between them. "That's putting it lightly," she said darkly, then prodded it with one finger, like it was dangerous. It was the closest she had come to her own self, and it made him think.

If this was going to work—whatever _this_ was—then now was the time to start building backstory, some new history under their new identities. (But how long could such an illusion really last?)

"I've read it before," Hank offered abruptly. "In fact, I did my thesis on it."

One raised eyebrow. "Genius as well as cute."

He felt his cheeks grow hot; he wondered if she could tell when a blue-furred mutant blushed.

He wondered if she had truly forgiven him.

He almost blurted then—_Raven, why are you doing this?_—but he took a deep breath, and it was _her_, all summery and hot and blue and sitting right in front of him with that little smile and quizzically tilted head, just as if the skin she wore was the only thing that had ever changed.

He took a deep breath. "I guess."


	2. Chess Pieces

Trish came by Harry's every Tuesdays and Thursdays after classes. Hank showed up every Mondays and Thursdays after Charles would finally kick him out of the lab, claiming that beakers and test tubes were poor substitutes for therapy. It only took three weeks for Alex to give Hank a knowing look and tell him that Charles sure didn't seem to have to try so hard any more. Hank ignored _that_. He wondered if "Trish" was ignoring anybody.

They discussed everything from the weather to minority rights (somehow, skirting the word 'mutant' in favor of things like Gandhi, peaceful protests, preemptive strikes, etc.) to favorite hobbies to worst subjects. She didn't mind him waxing eloquent about his theories she would never understand, just smiling at him from those dark eyes over her tall glass of steaming frappacino. He didn't mind her eerily strategic militant theories. Every once in a while he wondered if somewhere equally out of the way, Charles and Erik played chess and discussed much the same things.

"You're wandering," Trish prodded, one eyebrow raised in an amused expression.

Hank focused back on the here and now and smiled sheepishly. "Just thinking."

"Ships and shoes and sealing wax?" she quipped.

"More like cabbages and kings," he rejoined heartily. Too heartily.

She reached out a hand to stroke his fur and said softly, "Okay."

They stared at each other for a long moment. Hank cleared his throat and picked up his drink. "To friends who can agree to disagree."

She smirked, a genuine smirk that did not belong on Trish's face but that _did_ belong on Raven's. "I'll drink to that."

Perhaps he should have been relieved they didn't break out the chess board.

* * *

><p>Harry was the first to break their peace. <em>"Someone's <em>stirring up trouble," he muttered and tossed a newspaper down on the table between them.

Frown lines puckered on her brow.

Hank glanced at the headline—and froze. Fort Dawes had been broken into. Speculation was rampant on how it could be possible. And Hank... His thoughts raced ahead of him and stopped— No. His thoughts raced faster and stopped—

On her.

"What was in Dawes?" Trish asked suddenly, her head swiveling up to look into Harry's face and sending a cloud of her scent Hank's way. "Is something missing?"

Hank was almost aghast at how innocent she sounded.

Harry grinned his gap-toothed grin. "Only all the security footage from between 11:30 pm and 4:30 am, reportedly the memories of the security guards for the same period, and absolutely _everything _in the file room."

Top secret files, _memories_... Hank felt like he would be sick. He watched Trish frown at the newspaper, reading it carefully, and watched Harry return to the counter to brew up another round of his famous black coffee.

"What do you think?" Hank blurted suddenly.

Trish looked up, startled. Her eyes flickered, then softened. She reached and slid her hands into his blue, furry ones and held on tight. "We're not chess pieces, Hank," she said softly. "If you believe in peaceful protest, _go_ for it. If ou want to do something different than what someone else expects of you, _do _it. If you don't want to fight...then don't."

Hank looked down at their clasped hands, then back into those soft, dark eyes that should have been gold. "Do you want to go for a drive?" he asked.

She smiled.

She took him back to her apartment, and they made love. She tasted exactly the way she smelled, like heat and summer and blueness—and Raven.

He had her drop him off near a park he knew the Professor favored and looked around until he found them. He fell to studying the two young men, a game board—a _chess _board—between them. Their game was deadly serious. Their mouths moved as though they spoke, one to another.

Hank wondered, briefly, if Charles asked Erik about Dawes.


	3. A Game Afoot

"Enjoy your little outing?" Emma queried, clearly knowing more than she was saying.

Eyes narrowed in response. With almost startling swiftness, the fair redhead who had entered melted into blue. "Stay out of my head," Mystique snapped.

Emma laughed goldenly. "You can't be serious."

Mystique raised an eyebrow. She had done battle with Charles before. She had _taught _him how to uncover the labyrinthine mind, only ceasing because she occasionally just wanted to rest.

Trust did not come easy to a cast-off from the streets. The one thing Charles never fully realized or _understood_ was that trust had never come to _her _at all.

Mystique practically purred. "If that's the way you play..."

Emma frowned, then was slammed hard with the genuine pains of real hunger, with the twisting nightmares of an impressionable young mind, and with the absurd wonder of a little blonde girl down a rabbit hole. Reality twisted with fantasia and imagination, inseparable and inescapable.

Emma shuddered and regrouped. But when she looked up to glare at Mystique, Mystique was gone.

* * *

><p>Mystique hated the university. To gain her political science degree, she had to shift to a man or claim she wanted to become a campaign manager for a man—instead of having a successful political career of her own. (She had the same complaint with Erik.)<p>

With a quick shift into Trish's foreign-feeling skin, she set out onto the campus. She had a few errands she needed to run. Namely, there was groundwork to be laid for a future that Erik would never set into motion and Charles would never realize could be necessary. (Being a mutant in politics would be as difficult as being a woman.) But Mystique thought ahead—a skill trained into her from being abandoned by her parents, not from the two men in her life that both felt _they _were the ones who made her who she was.

She liked Hank for one reason in particular. He only tried once to change her.

He failed.

* * *

><p>Hank didn't know where the letter came from, offering him correspondence courses in the political sciences. He had talked about such things with Rav—no, <em>Trish<em>—but...

He tried to shrug it off, but he didn't talk to Charles or Alex or Sean about it (and looking at why was not an option). He did catch a sad, wistful expression pass through Xavier's eyes just once, and he wondered if their mentor knew he was being shut out. (Turning a blind eye was becoming more and more natural; he could curse what Raven was making of him.)

He accepted.


End file.
